Abbotts foot in mouth thread...

[Wokko]

[David]

I get the importance of sensitivity in diplomatic speech and that Abbott is generally a helpless, bumbling naïf on these matters, but I do get sick of all the nationalistic chest-beating over military history. I mean, just recently we had Australia's Russian community up in arms because an academic suggested that the Soviet army behaved in any way less than honourably as they were raping and pillaging their way through East Germany. I agree with Wokko that our selective interpretation of these events leads us to accept by default an (what I consider to be) unacceptably blinkered view of what was and wasn't morally defensible in WW2. The real shame here is that these horrors are still called upon as a measurement of national pride, here and pretty much everywhere else.

Anyway, perhaps Abbott would do well from now on to follow Basil Fawlty's advice: don't mention the war.

[Tannin]

Wokko, I think I see your point, which seems to be that the Japanese military were acting by a code of behaviour and, because they stuck to their code, they were therefore "honourable"; the fact that we don't understand or agree with their code (in your view) is not relevant to their individual honour.

It's a logical view, but deeply wrong. The thing is, honour isn't only about having a code and sticking to it despite all pain, fear, and adversity. Honour isn't just about physical courage. Honour requires courage of all kinds, not least moral and intellectual. Honour requires that the individual have the intellectual courage to assess and reassess his beliefs and actions, and the moral courage to alter those actions when they are evil or likely to lead to evil results.

The unbelievable barbarity and brutality of the Japanese Army in WW2, barbarity that would have sickened even Hitler's troops, came about as a direct consequence of the Japanese soldier's lack of intellectual courage (too afraid to think out of the box) and lack of moral courage (so afraid of being though less of by his peers that he would commit unspeakable brutalities). It was not, repeat not honourable. His extraordinary physical courage does not excuse or make up for his culpable moral failings, and his overall behaviour is as dishonourable as it is possible to be. May they rot in Hell forever.

War is barbarity, and there were atrocities committed by all sides; no question of that. Nevertheless, the barbarities committed by the Japanese Army eclipse all others by an order of magnitude. Hitler's mob killed more people, sure, and stand condemned by history for that. Hitler's Army was not the prime mover, however; it was mostly the Gestapo and various civilian organisations which ran the death camps. But the sheer delight in torture and killing showed by the Japanese Army in particular, coupled with their contempt for the human conventions of war, stands unparalleled.

The Japanese soldier was not honourable. Not in any sense. There were some who were, but in the main they were lowest, most contemptible sub-human vermin ever to don a uniform and pick up a machine gun.

[David]

^ What you are describing is essentially a soldier's training. Loss of independent thought and ability to think compassionately/empathically are not just unfortunate by-products of the training process, they're one of the essential aims of the training process. Obviously there was something particularly brutal about Japanese military culture to permit the atrocities that were carried out in Korea, China and South-East Asia, but we're not talking about a psychology a world away from what caused American soldiers to torture detainees in Abu Graib.

If you think that there was something beyond their training that made Japanese soldiers—as with everywhere else, essentially ordinary young men—morally inferior to those of other countries, then you are veering dangerously close to racism. That's not your fault; our war propaganda of the day leant heavily on racist prejudice, and that still carries through in public discourse about the war today.

[1061]

[Tannin]

Rubbish, David, and deeply offensive rubbish.

They were indeed morally inferior to the soldiers of other countries; in that war and in other wars. The proof is there in their actions. As you say, it is the aim and purpose of any military training to suppress individual thought and suppress the innate human sense of fair play and kindness - yes, it is innate, and it is not unique to humans - and also as you say there are plenty of examples of the soldiers of other nations committing atrocities of a similar general kind. However, the scale, the consistency, and the sheer evil brutality of the Japanese Army between about 1930 and 1945 is unparalleled. (Japanese Navy troops were, in the main, much less evil.) We can speculate as to the reasons, but there can be no question as to the facts: they were worse, much much worse, than any others involved in that conflict, or in any other conflict between modern armies I can think of. There is any amount of hard historical evidence showing this, and it is not possible to claim that it is "just propaganda".

I gather that our idiot PM Abbott said something really stupid and ignorant in a speech the other day saying that they "fought with honour" or some such nonsense. If so, it demonstrates an appalling ignorance about the facts of history. Given Abbott's idiotic claim the previous week that the 500,000 Aboriginal Australians here when the First Fleet arrived did not exist - the tool said this country was "unsettled" - perhaps I shuld not be surprised.

[Tannin]

[David]

Granted, the "fought with honour" line was a bit thoughtless all things considered (though perhaps less so in the context of ordinary celebratory war jargon). I also grant you that (regiments of?) the Japanese army seem to have had less regard for civilians' wellbeing than, say, the Americans on the Western front. Though, I think it's a difficult and fraught act to parse that conclusion given the overhanging spectre of the cruel, soulless Jap of WW2 propaganda. Those placards wanted to convince Australians that there was something monstrous; something morally inferior about the Japanese ethnicity itself. If we reject that, as we must, then we are left with the task of looking around at all the ordinary young men we know and realising that it was people like them who raped and slaughtered their way through Nanjing and elsewhere, and that they would do much the same in the same circumstances.

How does that happen? Perhaps a militaristic, racist culture contributed, but I can't help but feel that something much more brutal and traumatising (perhaps a combination of a certain kind of military training and the experience of warfare itself) must have happened to make them like that. Or perhaps we all have that capacity for horrific behaviour if we are sufficiently brainwashed and know we can get away with it. Whatever the case, I could never demonise individual soldiers (be they American, German or Japanese) because I know I might well have done the same in their place. That's a deeply unsettling thought, but a necessary one.

[Tannin]

1: No, you would not have done. You have moral fibre, you have the courage to think things through, you have the ability to question your own actions and reassess where necessary. You won't always be right, but you will try to be right and do so more often than not.

2: The more you learn about the history of the era, the more you discover that there was something monstrous; something evil, something not just morally inferior but grossly so about the Japanese, and in particular the Japanese Army. The tales of terrible, repeated atrocities told by the shock-horror propaganda merchants of the time were, if anything, understatements. The graphic truth of the Japanese behaviour during that war was worse than the news outlets of that time would dare to print.

3: Stop trying to pretend that this is something to do with racism. This is historical fact, easily verifiable by anyone willing to read the history. This is not about isolated incidents - there were thousands upon thousands of incidents. This is not just about murdering civilians - all sides murdered civilians, especially the Nazis, less so most of the Allies, but all sides did that. This is about enjoying torture, reveling in cruelty for its own sake - and not only of civilians, the Japanese particularly took delight in humiliating, murdering, and torturing surrendered prisoners of war; they routinely and deliberately violated all the (minimally) civilised conventions of, for example, respecting hospital ships, not murdering prisoners, honouring surrender, and so on and on and on. They were a terrible blight on the history of civilisation. The German troops fought with honour (in the main), as did those of most other combatants; the Japanese did not.

The hysterical anti-Japanese propaganda of the time was different in character to (say) the anti-German propaganda of 1941 or the anti-French propaganda of 1809 because people who came across first-hand evidence of their mad brutality and animal atrocity - many of them people who were veterans of the First World War and of the Second World War in Europe and North Africa and knew the horrors of war well - these people were genuinely shocked rigid by it. It was like nothing anyone had ever known. If those people went on to draw a racist conclusion from what they saw, well, who can blame them?

These days no-one with a clue thinks that there is a racial explanation for it, but you are trying to whitewash the whole thing and pretend that it never happened. They were the lowest of the low, the worst scum to ever wear a uniform and carry a machine gun, and that's not hyperbole, it's historical fact. Read the history and come back to me on that, 'coz ther s no possible doubt about it. What they did was sickening and a perpetual disgrace.

[Mugwump]

The point, surely, is that humans are the product of culture, and a culture is an expression of history. At birth, we are hardware with the capacity to acquire different kinds of cultural software. And some cultures - not races, but cultures - have more barbaric features than others, at points in their history. Japan's culture, as evidenced from the invasion of China onward, was indeed so. There are reasons in Japanese history for this.

I agree with David that most cultures and all himans have some potential for barbarism, and they may become more or less vicious, depending on the historic pressures that form and deform them. Subject imperial Britain to hyperinflation in 1923, and Fascism might be remembered as a British phenomenon. Where I disagree, is with the assumption that a critique or relative valuation of a culture is tantamount to racism. This seems to me one of the more pernicious errors of postmodernism, and something that weakens our value system.

Within that framework, I'm completely with Tannin in his assessment that the culture of Japan and the Japanese Army in the first half of the 20thC was one of the more loathsome in human history, and for Abbott to speak of honour in that regard is, even by his standards, a treasonous falsification of the experience of so many young Australian men who suffered so hideously.

[Tannin]

I agree entirely, Mugwump.

For the record - and with particular relevance to David's stupid racism remarks, which although written in ignorance are nevertheless offensive and do him no credit - I happen to particularly like Japan and its people. I have spent more time in Japan than any other country bar Australia. Japanese is the only foreign language I ever learned more than a few words of. It's a great country with a wonderful culture and very fine people. Japan will never repeat the horrible mistakes of the early-mid 20th Century, nothing is more certain.

I support moves to establish even closer ties to Japan than we have already - but I do not support Abbott's insanely childish policy of talking big about alliance with Japan (and other countries) against China. This is leading us down a very, very dangerous path; it's completely unnecessary; quite pointless; and very, very stupid.

[1061]

[Tannin]

Both, I think, 1061, but do not underestimate the power of shame in Japanese culture. That is a great national strength which - as we saw in 1942, can become a terrible weakness too. I believe that they have moved on from that terrible aspect of it and will never repeat it but, as you say, it should never be forgotten.

[pietillidie]

I wouldn't go too far in dismissing some of David's assumptions. War is hardly a rational arena (which is why you don't unleash its unpredictabilities if you don't have to), and the entire process of preparation for war is brainwashing writ large.

Stanford prison experiments, anyone? I don't think too many psychologists disagree with Zimbardo at a technical level (see his more recent testimony concerning Abu Ghraib - http://www.apa.org/monitor/oct04/goodbad.aspx).

And that basically confirms the most salient finding of post-WW2 Holocaust studies: Ordinary people can both carry out and ignore shocking brutality while living ordinary lives under the wrong conditions (i.e., when submitted to just the right sequence of stressors and poisonous ideas).

It might feel good ignore such complexity, but it also gets you very close to a negative version of exceptionalism.

My only question in this thread concerned the need for David's initial conflation of the technical psycho-social questions, and their moral implications, with the immediate issue of foreign relations in an extremely dangerous tinderbox of a region.

One thing for certain, we all seem to agree Abbott's remarks were stupid/offensive/irresponsible/dangerous, or what have you.

[Tannin]

Who is ignoring any of that? Certainly not me, and not Mugwump either. David's problem is that he wants to play the racism card and use that to ignore the known facts of history. I studied the likes of Stanford and Millgram at tertiary level about the time David was born. They go a long way towards explaining why things happened, of course, but David is still stuck at the point of not admitting that they happened at all. (So is Abbott, of course, but Abbott is a dangerous ignoramus; David ought to be better than that. Read some history, David. Seriously.)

The question is "did they fight with honour?". The answer is unquestionably "no". They fought, in fact, with spectacular dishonour, and Abbott is once again hopelessly wrong in fact, not just opinion.